Matthew Newton
, ContributorI write about media consumption and the commercialization of culture.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

As London burns and violence creeps north into Manchester and Birmingham, Levi's launch of an advertising campaign that features images of rebellious youth clashing with police in riot gear comes at a bad time. That's the reality the brand is facing with "Legacy," the latest spot in its often controversial Go Forth series. And according to Creative Review, such synchronicity has led Levi's to postpone the UK release of the ad.

In "Legacy," rapid-cut editing jumps the viewer from scenes of couples kissing and serene beach sunsets, to those of city streets thick with riot gas and the steady march of armored law enforcement agents. As with all of Levi's Go Forth ads, a generic notion of freedom is at the heart of each jeans-centric narrative. Viewers are asked to suspend disbelief and buy into Go Forth as a nebulous youth movement of beautiful people who just so happen to wear slim, straight, and skinny.

And just as past campaigns have relied on the words of poets such as Walt Whitman, "Legacy" enlists the Charles Bukowski poem "The Laughing Heart" as a call to arms. Read by a narrator with a grizzled voice (not unlike Tom Waits), Bukowski's words are instantly transformed into ad copy, becoming a lyrical ode to the art of jeans selection, boiling away the author's artful intent and recontextualizing it as a sales pitch.

"Legacy" marries protest imagery, emotive music, and the words of a literary underdog in an attempt to realize Wieden + Kennedy's vision of high commercial art. But as Creative Review's Eliza Williams writes, "Levi's is far from the first brand to want to co-opt the romanticism and danger of protest imagery for commercial gain." However, Levi's has returned time and again to this same trough for its Go Forth campaign, often banking on the selling power of cultural romanticism.

In this case, it remains to be seen if Levi's truly wants the public to embrace the scenes of social upheaval depicted in this latest ad. As one YouTube commenter was quick to point out: "It'd be a nice irony if this ad inspired wholesale looting of their product. Rather a waste of their advertising budget, eh? And a caution for advertisers trying to identify with the spirit﻿ of the age - they were a just a little too accurate this time!"